


If You’re So Wrong, How Can I Listen To You All Night Long?

by Nemesischaris



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: Dark Hermione Granger, Discord: Bellamione Coven, Discord: Bellamione Cult, F/F, Lovecarft AU, Sane Bellatrix Black Lestrange, The Dreams in the Witch House, eldritch horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:41:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23010403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemesischaris/pseuds/Nemesischaris
Summary: Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams, Hermione Granger did not know.  Hidden in the moldy, unhallowed garret gable where she spent long hours hunched over a cluttered desk to study and write and wrestle with figures and formulas when she was not tossing and turning on the meager iron bed was a brooding, festering horror of the ancient town.OrHP Lovecraft’s The Dreams in the Witch House but with Bellamione.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Bellatrix Black Lestrange
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	If You’re So Wrong, How Can I Listen To You All Night Long?

**Author's Note:**

> This story is heavily based on HP Lovecraft’s The Dreams in the Witch House and I took the liberty of borrowing some passages from the story as well.  
>   
> I do not own anything.

Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams, Hermione Granger did not know. Hidden in the moldy, unhallowed garret gable where she spent long hours hunched over a cluttered desk to study and write and wrestle with figures and formulas when she was not tossing and turning on the meager iron bed was a brooding, festering horror of the ancient town.

  


Arkham was a changeless, legend-haunted city deep in the Miskatonic Valley of Massachusetts. It’s no secret that many of the gambrel roofs once hid witches from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was there any doubt that the gable room that she resided in harbored old Bellatrix Black, whose disappearance from the Salem Jail was still unexplained to this day. It couldn’t have been a more average day in 1692, but the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone wall with some red, sticky fluid and a suddenly empty cell could not be explained by the jailer or the Cotton Mather. A mystery that intrigued Hermione’s obsessed mind—the reason why she had taken the room in the old Witch House.

  


As a student of non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics at the Miskatonic University, she was fascinated by the possibility of combining them with folklore to explain the existence of a multi-dimensional universe where the supernatural of Gothic tales and the hushed whispers of back alleyways were a reality. Her research led her to dubious old books on forbidden secrets and elder magic that were kept under lock and key in the vault at the university library like the dreaded _Necronomicon_ of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary _Book of Eibon_ , and the suppressed _Unaussprechlichen Kulten_ of von Junzt. However, her professors had forbidden her to continue to consult such books after learning about her course load and urged her to slacken up. 

  


Instead, Hermione turned her attention to the Essex County records on Bellatrix Black’s trial and what she had confessed under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer. She read the ramblings on lines and curves and angles that could lead through walls and traverse into spaces beyond. She read the accounts of midnight meetings in dark valleys and on the uninhabited island in the river. She read the admittance of Black’s oath to the Black Man and her new secret name of Qosm. She read the official statement of Black’s vanishing act. After some pondering, Hermione believed that the secret to her own work must also lay hidden in that same room that housed a seventeenth-century old woman that somehow gained insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the most modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter. 

  


The room was easy to secure. The house was unpopular. The room was aversive. And despite the fact that many of the previous occupants died prematurely, or that child-like cries were heard near Walpurgis Night and All Hallow’s Eve, or that unexplained stench from the house’s attic was often noted after those dreaded seasons, Hermione’s determination did not falter. A feeling of triumph washed over her the first time she stepped into the room. It was a decently spacious room but irregularly shaped. The north wall slanted perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. There was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house’s north side, though a view from the exterior showed where a window had been boarded up. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—was likewise inaccessible. And no amount of pressure or persuasion would allow the landlord to let her investigate either of these two closed spaces. Still, all was not lost. She had the space to herself, and Black must have designed the room with these peculiar angles for a specific reason; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space?

  


It was about a month into Hermione’s stay when she got the touch of brain-fever along with the dreams. She must have studied too hard that one February night, she reasoned. Since then, her concentration was fleeting, headaches plagued her constantly, and she started to develop a sensitivity to sound. Furthermore, she found herself almost hypnotically drawn to that corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall—she found herself staring into that corner for hours on end with no obvious explanation.

  


Her dreams were no better but considering the amount of mathematics and folklore she had immersed herself in, and the constant brainstorming on the vague regions which her formulas told her must lie beyond the three dimensions that are known, it’s no wonder, she argued, that they consisted of plunges through colorful, limitless abysses—the fourth dimension she called it. In her dreams, she floated amidst countless other things and beings, some organic, some inorganic. They exhibited the true sense of alien, for they were beyond description or even comprehension. Everything was unspeakably menacing and horrible and alive. And whenever one of those things seemed to have the motions of noticing her, she felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted her awake. 

  


Right before her nightly colorful and frightful dive into the abyss, when she would be laying in bed on the verge of consciousness, a faint emerald glow would fill her vision. At first, a black cat sat in the corner, boreing into her soul with hungry yellow eyes. After the initial few nights, a nebulous blur that gradually transformed into the shape of a woman would replace the cat. She stood in the corner—watching with the same hungry eyes, then slowly approaching, inch by inch. Before the woman could get close enough to reach her with outstretched claws, however, this dream would always melt away. The woman extruded an air of assertiveness and intimidation with her black contested dress and wild voluminous hair. She reminded Hermione heavily of a figure she had glimpsed, once or twice, stalking the narrow winding lanes in the neighborhood. A mere coincidence due to a fevered and weary mind, she rationalized.

  


Her dream shifted as February faded into March. She had a vague sense of conversing with the women in her dreams then, but the details always slipped away like a wisp of smoke dissipating in the open air. What she does remember is the impression of unbridled excitement, the same feeling whenever she is allowed to study rare and obscure knowledge or when she is close to solving an impossible conundrum. She was close to proving her hypothesis. She could feel it.

  


Around this time, a follow lodger informed her about her sleepwalking. Ron, a fellow student at the University that stayed in the room below hers, mentioned the sound of footfalls and creaks of floorboards during late hours in the night. Furthermore, twice when Ron visited her room in the wee hours for help with last-minute school work, Hermione was always missing but her shoes and clothing were untouched. Although annoyed at the intrusive habit of her flatmate, this information worried her. Where could she be wondering to barefoot and with only her nightclothes on? After scolding Ron and lecturing him about the seriousness of the invasion of privacy, she resolved to investigate the matter if it continued by sprinkling flour on her floors. 

  


March crawled on and unfortunately, her schoolwork started to take a dive. She could still pour over her complex formulas hours on end (if she wasn’t staring into that mesmerizing corner), and she developed a knack for solving Riemannian equations. However, she couldn’t focus on anything else, nor was she interested in subjects such as Advanced General Psychology or Advanced Genetic Analysis anymore. 

  


Another thing that didn’t help was her sensitive hearing. Her fever-sharpened ears were constantly bombarded with muffled phantom meowing, faint seductive whispers or loud whining prayers. The incorporeal cats seemed to follow her everywhere, on the rare occasion, she would glimpse a tail disappearing around the corner, but she would never catch the feline culprit. The incorporeal whispers liked to distract her during lectures or when she was studying. Sometimes it spoke in a foreign tongue that she didn’t understand but resonated with her soul. Often, the smoky, sultry voice promised her knowledge and pleasure. Whenever she was in the house, Neville’s constant muttering to his God assaulted her. The superstitious oaf, always clutching his silver crucifix, loved spouting rambling stories of the ghost of Old Bellatrix or the devilish black cat that roamed the neighborhood. Now, he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near—a night when hell unleashes all it’s evil on the occupants on earth and Satan’s servants performed unspeakable rituals and deeds. Neville knew about such things, for his grandmother had heard the tales from the old country. It was wise to pray and count one’s beads at this season, he chided. Whenever Hermione fell victim to his ramblings, she would nod along out of politeness but tune him out almost entirely—she held no religious beliefs and turned her nose up to such nonsense.

  


Unnervingly, Hermione started to find solace in her dreams with the arrival of April. The technicolored abyss with all its floating extrinsic horror didn’t terrify her anymore. In the fourth dimension, she was free from the voices that plagued her waking moments. She was drifting one night when a pulling sensation tugged at her core. Then, all of a sudden, she was standing barefoot and in her nightclothes on pristine black marble floors and bathed in a diffused green light. Two giant silver serpents stood proudly, guarding a doorway where the emerald light originated. The statues loomed over her judgingly and she swore the eyes were following her every movement. Clicking of heels approached her from behind, but before she could turn around to face her assailant, twin arms snaked around her waist, pulling her close to the warm body behind her, and a chin rested on her shoulder. She leaned back instinctively. When the familiar smoky voice whispered sweetness in her ear, she couldn’t stop her rising arousal. She woke up with a gasp—chest heaving, heart galloping, sweat dripping, and slickness pooling between her legs. When Ron asked her about the bruise on her neck the next morning, a chill ran down her spine. She snapped at him and told him to mind his own business but secretly blushed as she recalled entering a verdant room and wickedly talented fingers.

  


She continued to visit the verdant room every night and found herself retaining details of her dreams more frequently and effortlessly. The massive room was windowless, a fireplace with green flames as its main source of lighting. A black leather couch sat facing the fireplace and a large fur skin of some unidentifiable beast laid in between. Bookcases lined two of its walls full with books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, a dark onyx desk sat in a corner with small objects of unknown shape and nature. A magnificent four-poster bed with dark wood and snake carvings leaned against the wall directly opposite of the fireplace. She had concluded that her seducer and her feline stalker was none other than the old witch Bellatrix Black—while that information should have terrified her, as it would have any other residence in Arkham, she had grown comfortable in the other woman’s presence. Bella despite her sadistic and diabolical reputation never once tried to harm her. Instead, they spend the nightly hours between the smooth silk sheets on the bed or pouring over books such as the sinister _Liver Ivonis_ , the infamous _Cultes de Goules_ of Cornet d’Erlette, the hellish _De Vermis Mysteriis_ of Ludvig Primm, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the _Book of Dzyan_ and many others in written in symbols she later learned to decipher. Many people, including her professors at the university, would scorn at her for indulging in such morally controversial texts and topics, but to Hermione, the more forbidden the knowledge was, the more enticing it was. Furthermore, knowledge was knowledge, it was neither good or evil, and as long as she didn’t use any of her newfound knowledge for anything maleficent, where was the harm of learning?

  


One night in mid-April, while they settled on the furs in front of green flames, Hermione nestled between Bella’s legs and leaning comfortably against Bella’s front with a book in her lap, the witch stopped playing with the girl’s brown curls and spoke seriously. It was time, she claimed, that Hermione went with her to the throne of Azathoth at the center of ultimate Chaos and she must sign in her blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name. Hermione froze with trepidation—she had read of “Azathoth” and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description. Twin arms held her tenderly close and the smoky, loving voice sought out to sway her convictions for the remainder of the night.

  


The scholar wasn’t able to focus on classes the next morning—debating about the rudimentary principles of space-time continuum and the theory of relativity with her simple-minded peers and professors left her unsatisfied and was a tremendous waste of her time when she knew so much more than they did—so she made the executive decision to skip her afternoon ones. Could she do it? Could she follow in her lover’s footsteps? She was not delusional, she knew who Bella was and what kind of company the other woman kept. And while Hermione reveled in the witch’s nocturnal company and she relished in learning transcendental knowledge, was she really going to sign her life away to join the witch-cult? Walking around campus eased her thoughts slightly. However, she found herself automatically turning her eyes towards a seemingly irresistible point far off in the horizon. Hiding in the library for a couple of hours seemed to quenched this new impulse, but once she walked out of the building, her body, once again, turned naturally towards an unknown point. This time, under the crescent moon, her eyes greeted the mighty hunter eternally stalking the night sky. Tearing her gaze away from the constellation took considerably more effort than necessary. 

  


Neville was waiting for her when she returned to the old house. He claimed to have witnessed green light coming from her windows the night before when he came home late from celebrating Patriots’ Day. He wanted to warn her of the light for there was no doubt in his mind that it was Bellatrix’s infamous witch light that glowed from within her room. He urged her to wear a crucifix because the old witch was haunting the young woman. Hermione’s temper overcame her; she shoved him roughly while yelling at him to shut up and stomped past his fallen form. She could smell the distinctive stench of alcohol on her fellow lodger and couldn’t listen to his grating voice tarnish someone she cared for anymore. Neville and Ron, who just happened to walk out of the kitchen and witnessed the altercation, stared at her retreating figure wide-eyed and in shock.

  


She evaded sleep as long as she could that night but knew it was futile when she felt the familiar tug in her navel. Bella greeted her warmly in their room and the last strands of hesitance melted away—this was where she belonged. She nodded her consent and reached up to kiss the grinning, delicately curved lips. When she pulled away for oxygen, they were no longer in the verdant room, nor were they alone. A grey stone altar with brown stains stood grimly in the vast ethereal space they were in, a tome of prodigious size lay open on it. In the distance, she imagined seeing a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing shadow, and hearing a thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute. A tall, lean dark figure stood next to the altar. He (or she) was bald with blazing red eyes, had snake-like slits for nostrils and wore a black shapeless robe that flowed to a nonexistent breeze. Bellatrix threw herself down into a low bow, worshiping at the feet of her lord. The name “Nyarlathotep” from the _Necronomicon_ crept into her mind. She shivered with unbridled dread when the figure turned their attention to her. They pointed to the book on the altar. Hermione stumbled forward. Bella’s cackling laughter encouraged her onward. A long, thin and sharp quill lay between the open ancient pages—it felt heavy in her hands. As the quill touched the empty page, she felt a sharp pain on the back of her left hand; it took all her mental fortitude to keep her hand steady and sign her name in the Black Book. A high, cold, sibilant sound called out her new secret name, Alw.

  


Hermione didn’t feel any different and the world continued on when she awoke. However, she was disengaged from her studies at the university and she couldn’t tolerate her flatmates anymore. She didn’t want to continue her mundane, tedious life and expressed her desires to Bella. Her lover chastised her impatience and told her that good things come to those who wait in her sing-song voice.

  


On the evening of April 28th, Bella announced they were going out. Slightly annoyed at the interruption, Hermione closed her book forcefully but took her hands, nonetheless. She felt the tug in her naval and found herself in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of fetid odors, with rotting walls of ancient houses towering above. She covered her nose with a sleeve to attempt to block out the smell. The Black Man stood ahead of them, silently pointing to a dark open doorway to the left. Hermione followed Bella dutifully up the creaking staircase and onto a rancid landing. They stopped in front of a nondescript door. Bella fumbled with the latch and pushed open the door, motioning to Hermione to wait and disappeared inside. Her oversensitive hearing picked up muffled cries and soft thuds of something heavy hitting the floor, all the while, an emerald light radiated from the darkness. Her witch came out a few minutes later with a small bundle in her arms. She took the senseless form as instructed and followed her back out to their waiting Lord. 

  


The newspaper the next day featured a case of breaking and entering, murder and kidnapping in Knockturn Alley. A two-year-old child was taken from his home and the parents were found dead at the residence. No signs of trauma or struggle were found on their bodies. In fact, they seemed perfectly healthy besides the fact that they were dead. No eye-witness came forward, but a neighbor did mention an eerie green light emanating from the apartment. Some people in the neighborhood speculated the child must have been marked for sacrifice on Sabbath for Satan’s familiar was spotted on the windowsill a few days before and the whole affair was inevitable—children have been taken this way every year since the collective memory could remember. Hermione read the article detachedly in her attic room in the witch house while Neville’s persistent, nuisance praying from the ground floor echoed in throughout the building.

  


To all but one of the denizens of Arkham, the days leading up to May Day’s eve dragged on like an insect trapped in amber, struggling to free itself. This was a dreaded, sinful, atrocious night—Walpurgis revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place strangely void of all plant life. hellish chants would fill the night and satanic celebrations would be performed in the Black Man’s name. To Hermione, an incessant buzzing energy kept building under her skin waiting for a release, waiting for the thunderstorm to arrive in all its destructive glory. Soon, it would be the last day Hermione will need to stay in this pitiful existence. After she performs the blackest ceremonies with Bella, she will be freed to travel the cosmos with her lover. The night couldn’t arrive soon enough.

  


She heard it—the distant, windbore notes of rhythmic chanting in the dark ravine. Almost immediately, a faint green glow greeted her in the corner, Bella’s corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. She walked into it readily and welcomed the tug in her core. When she reappeared, she stood on slanting floors. On the left, the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular pit. The cramped, crude space that was most likely the closed loft above the slanting ceiling in her room had a large table and bench in the center. Most prominently, a small white figure of an infant boy, a wicked dagger and a peculiar metal bowl sat on the table. Bella greeted her with a short peck that guaranteed more for later and led her to the table. The dark witch picked up the bowl and held out the dagger for Hermione to take. It was now or never. Alw accepted the dagger and stood over the unconscious and unclothed infant. She started reciting in a raucid language memorized from a page in the _Necronomicon_. Magic filled the musty air. It vibrated in her bones. It was intoxicating. It was addicting. She gripped the grotesque dagger above the small white sacrifice with both hands. She desired more. Qosm joined in with the chanting and moved forward with the bowl. When the intonation reached its climax, she plunged the dagger down in one swift movement. As the bowl drank greedily from its offering and as life fled the small body, an exhilarating sigh left her lips. Her lover looked no different than what she felt, pupils blown and panting slightly. With the urge to devour the sight in front of her, she cupped the sculpturesque cheekbones with her bloody hands and pulled them in for a fervent kiss. She needed more, now! A blazing red light engulfed them as she took them back to their room.

  


Hermione Granger was declared missing after she failed to turn up for classes for 2 weeks. Residents in the old Witch House were questioned by authorities but it was fruitless. Ron disclosed that she was up in her room on the night of April 29th but never saw her leave. He did remember to mention her habit of sleepwalking. Neville was no use at all; he was an incoherent mess praying and mumbling to himself. He spoke of the end of days, the devil’s new familiar—a raven of vice, and that Hermione’s soul was doomed forevermore. The landlord just grumbled under his breath saying that a missing tenant was better than one that committed suicide or one that was murdered.

**Author's Note:**

> The witch names I selected for our ladies are in Coptic Egyptian.  
> Bellatrix's name is Qosm which translates to darkness or tempest.  
> Hermione's name is Alw, meaning pupil.


End file.
